New York, 8 December 2001 - Over time and across cultures, extraordinary
manipulations of the body have occurred in a continuing evolution of the
concept of beauty. Entitled Extreme Beauty: The Body Transformed
and on view at the Metropolitan Museum of Art until 3 March 2002, this
exhibition offers a unique opportunity to see fashion as the practice of
some of the most extreme strategies to conform to shifting concepts of
the physical ideal.

Various zones of the body—neck,
shoulders, bust, waist, hips, and feet—have been constricted,
padded, truncated, or extended through subtle visual adjustments of
proportion, less subtle prosthesis, and often deliberate physical
deformation.

Costumes in the exhibition—ranging from a
16th-century-style iron corset to Jean Paul Gaultier's notorious "Madonna"
bustier—will be augmented by anthropological and ethnographic
examples and by paintings, prints, and drawings, including caricatures
by Cruikshank, Daumier,
Rowlandson, and Vernet.

Extreme
Beauty: The Body TransformedMetropolitan Museum of ArtManhattan,
New York6 December 2001 - 3 March 2002

BOOK
TIP : Extreme Beauty: The Body TransformedBy Harold KodaThe
Metropolitan Museum of ArtYale University Press; New Haven and
London 2001168 pages, 225 illustrations (more than 150 in color)
Available in cloth or paper.

The tea-tray supporting bustle of
an 1880s French visiting dress; the bound feet and caged nails of
aristocratic Manchu women; the neck-extending chokers of the Masai, of
Edwardian beauties, and John Galliano's designs for Dior; or the waist
suppression of the sixteenth-century iron corsets and the cinches of
early nineteenth-century dandies are some of the images in the book
published in conjunction with the exhibition Extreme Beauty: The
Body Transformed